What You Need To Know About Video

I apologize in advance if you think I’m beating you over the head about video - but if your content strategy is still driven by static text and imagery - someone’s about to eat your lunch.  Here’s a quick history lesson and a question.

YouTube

Back in the day it was all about YouTube - you’d film your video, load it up to your channel and then post that video onto your blog and share it out.  This would drive traffic to your website and give you content to share on your social platforms, (content that in turn would drive people back to your website.)

Social Embeds

We changed strategy a few years ago when social platforms started allowing embedded video to play in their streams.  Instead of posting the video on your blog and sharing the link to social - now you would load the video directly to the platform.  

This reduced traffic to your website but increased activity and interaction on social so it was worth the trade off.  The only hold out was Facebook that didn’t allow 3rd party videos to play in their news feed.

Live Streaming

The arrival last year of Periscope and Meerkat announced the beginning of live streaming. It was great for people who already had a large audience but not so much for smaller businesses as after you finished the live stream the video was only retained for 24 hours and then deleted.

The arrival of Katch.me was great as it saved the live streams enabling you to post them to your blog and then share out across social - pretty much the old YouTube model.  However with the death of Katch last week (over 1 million users but no revenue model) - live streaming for small business seemed toast, until…

Facebook FTW

January saw people on Facebook watch over 100 million hours of video a day.  The last few months have seen the release of live streaming capabilities to all business pages.

While video content is given a higher ranking than text or images, live streaming video is rewarded even further, giving business owners who experiment with live video much greater visibility in news feeds.

Is Video Right For You?

Where are you connecting with your customers?

This information is coming to you as text and imagery because email is my primary channel.  If Facebook was my primary channel I’d probably be doing this as video.

I’m bullish again on Facebook, particularly for small and medium sized businesses.  But, if you’re going to invest time and resource in the platform, video should definitely be part of your strategy.

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Image Credit: Machine Gun Ettiquette by drinks machine on Flickr